Is Your Town on This List? NJ’s 25 Lowest Math-Scoring School Districts

Every spring, New Jersey students in grades 3 through 8 sit down for the NJSLA, the state's official standardized test. It covers English and math, and the results get published by the Department of Education so parents, educators, and honestly anyone curious can see how their local schools stack up.

For this list, we pulled the most recent full data set from the 2024 NJSLA math results, focusing on the percentage of students in each district who scored Level 4 or 5, the state's official cutoff for "proficient." Basically, that's the group of kids who are actually hitting grade-level expectations in math, not just scraping by.

From there it was pretty simple. We lined up all 465-plus districts in the state by that proficiency percentage and sorted from lowest to highest. The 25 districts sitting at the very bottom of that list made the cut here.

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Why This Matters More Than You'd Think

A quick heads up before you scroll through the list: smaller districts can look worse (or better) than they really are just because a handful of kids taking the test can swing the percentage a lot. So a district with 20 test takers isn't quite an apples-to-apples comparison with a district that tested 2,000 kids. Still, the pattern across this list is pretty consistent and aligns with what many educators and parents already know about the state's biggest gaps.

Statewide, math proficiency landed around 41 percent in 2025. Every district on this list falls well below that number, and most are sitting under half of it.